There will be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade: those that are fully utilizing AI, and those that are out of business.
In my last two blogs is this Exponential Organization series (based on the new book Exponential Organizations 2.0), I covered Staff on Demand and the power of Community and the Crowd.
The truth is, these two attributes are enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Algorithms, which is the next ExO attribute.
With the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4/ChatGPT and Stability AI, the World Economic Forum predicts that nearly 25% of jobs will be disrupted in the next five years.
PwC Global estimates that AI will contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
The world’s biggest companies have already noticed—and they are leading the way in implementing AI.
To quote Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, “Google and Microsoft are going all-in with generative AI as core to their future. “There is no ‘we are still early’ here, trillion-dollar companies are shifting their whole strategy and focus.”
In today’s blog, we’ll look at a few case studies of companies successfully applying AI, explore how AI will shape the future of business, and offer a few tips on how to steer your AI journey.
Let’s dive in…
NOTE: Understanding how to turn your business into an ExO and increase your growth and impact is a key component of my year-round Abundance360 leadership program.
How Entrepreneurs are Using Generative AI
As an entrepreneur and investor, I love the below quote by Steve Blank. I couldn’t agree more!
“This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. AI has just transformed every industry and every business. Every possible piece of commerce and enterprise—software, consumer stuff, defense—is going to be reinvented in the next year with the application of generative AI and other AI models.”
– Steve Blank, Entrepreneur, Author & Stanford Professor
Here are just a few ways that entrepreneurs and leaders are using generative AI tools like ChatGpt and Google’s Bard to improve their businesses. I hope by now if you’ve been reading my blog, these are familiar to you:
Text Generation & Copywriting: Creating customized marketing content creation (emails, social media, blog posts), scriptwriting and storytelling for videos and ads, and creating engaging product descriptions. These systems harness existing content examples to develop compelling new material. Example Apps & Tools: ChatGPT, Google Bard, Jasper, Copy.ai, Writesonic, etc.
Customer Experience & Support: Automating customer service, improving response times and efficiency. Tools include AI chatbots and messaging apps for 24/7 service, email automation for rapid responses, self-service portals with personalized recommendations, and multilingual support for a wider audience. Performing sentiment analysis in order to empathize with customers, improving their experiences and handling more complex interactions with significant benefits for both contact center agents and customers. Example Apps & Tools: Anthropic, Cohere, Intercom, HubSpot Chatbot, etc.
Code Generation & Debugging: Transforming software development by automating code writing, completion, and vetting. Most notably increasing quality assurance by handling bug fixes, test generation, and documentation. It can suggest code completions in real-time, saving developers time and reducing errors, especially for repetitive tasks. Moreover, generative AI enhances coding for both experts and novices by detecting and fixing bugs using code pattern analysis, even before they become problematic. Example Apps & Tools: ChatGPT, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Codeium & AlphaCode.
Image Generation & Editing: Deep learning algorithms and generative adversarial networks (GANs) are automating image generation with spectacular results. This technology can revolutionize marketing by producing highly realistic product images for online stores and social media, creating visually striking brand materials such as logos, and designing engaging, aesthetically pleasing advertising. Example Apps & Tools: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, DALL-E, BlueWillow & DeepAI.
Video Generation & Editing: Revolutionizing the creation of marketing and product demo videos, enhancing brand recognition and sales conversions. Using image, text, and music generation, AI can produce videos from short clips to full-length movies. It takes diverse input data like images, blogs, articles, and music, and creatively combines them into an original piece. This process is akin to a futuristic robot director, capable of fulfilling unique video visions, such as a colossal robot battling a massive octopus with a death metal soundtrack. Example Apps & Tools: Descript, Synthesia, Kaiber, Genmo, etc.
Company Case Studies
Here’s another great and prophetic quote, this one by Kevin Kelly:
“The next 10,000 business plans will be for an entrepreneur to take a domain and add AI to it.”
– Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor, Wired magazine
AI and Algorithms have already become part of daily life in most of the world. They have become so ubiquitous that we barely notice them: Google’s page rank, Amazon’s recommendation engine, airline pricing, newspaper financial stories, air-traffic control, and so on.
Here are a few additional case studies of companies successfully implementing AI and Algorithms in their business:
ProFinda: A workforce optimization platform powered by AI. The self-described leader of “the Future of Work,” ProFinda maps an organization’s skills, knowledge, expertise, connections, and availability to build a single view of its talent pool, allowing employees to find expertise internally and enabling more efficient team-building and production.
FutureScope: A marketing firm that uses AI to generate engaging, customized daily newsletters designed to connect clients with their audiences, help generate targeted email lists, and convert audience members into paying customers (Full disclosure: I’m a Founder and use it to generate www.Futureloop.com and www.LongevityInsider.org).
Cainthus: In 2014, brothers David and Ross Hunt set out to provide affordable digital measurements to farmers to make data-driven decisions. Cainthus, now a part of Ever.Ag, combines computer vision and AI analytics to “enable individual animal management at scale.” Insights from the data helped optimize feed management and pen-level monitoring of cow behavior to ensure maximum welfare and, therefore, milk production. The outcome was an average increase of $254,760 farm profit with an $82,500 cost—a more than threefold ROI, plus improved cow comfort.
Khanmigo: A new AI-powered guide from Khan Academy that aims to mimic one-on-one tutoring experiences by providing tailored support, prompting critical thinking, and suggesting relevant resources. Khanmigo is still under development, but the entire Khan Academy ecosystem is excited about the potential of a customized AI tutor for every child.
How Will AI & Algorithms Shape the Future of Business?
AI will regularly be used in the daily operations of companies to model future products and services and design organizations.
The future is incredibly difficult to foresee, reflecting its enormous potential—the future of AI is literally the future of the world.
Here are 5 predictions for how AI will shape the future of the business:
1. Experiments: AIs will help great ideas (and entrepreneurs) scale rapidly by running an astronomical number of digital experiments for companies, optimizing every element of the value creation chain. AIs will generate their own hypotheses and the experiments needed to validate them.
2. Metaverse: AI will finally unlock the full potential of the metaverse as AR + VR + AI generate high-resolution customized user experiences for the purpose of commerce, education, entertainment, and health. AI-generated avatars and environments will become increasingly lifelike and massively personalized and compelling.
3. Emotional: AI will increasingly exhibit emotional sensing, will likely penetrate further into our private lives developing a Jarvis-like capability (i.e., from the movie Iron Man) that makes it indispensable and a co-pilot for daily life and every profession.
4. Professional AI Co-Pilot: We will see ever-increasing AI-human collaboration in more places. Every profession including CEO, medical doctor, lawyer, Chief Marketing Officer, etc. will have an AI co-pilot to help them achieve their professional goals. For example, within 5 years it will become malpractice to diagnose a patient without AI in the loop. Beyond this, within the decade we will see AI at the top of corporations, including on boards of directors and at the senior management level.
5. DAOs: We also will see an explosion of AI-driven decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)—that is, company operations that are entirely AI, complete with decision-making powers. Not surprisingly, AIs that are part of a company will develop their own Algorithms that will gather and develop their own data to maximize desired outcomes.
So, how can you start employing AI in your business?
Using AI & Getting a Chief AI Officer
Here are 4 distinct steps you can take to begin implementing AI and Algorithms:
1. Gather data. The Algorithmic process starts with harnessing data, which is gathered via sensors or human beings or imported from public or private datasets.
2. Organize data. The next step is to organize the data. This process is known as ETL (extract, transform, and load).
3. Apply. Once the data is accessible, machine-learning tools—such as Hadoop and Pivotal, or open-source deep-learning Algorithms from DeepMind and SkyMind—can extract insights, identify trends, and tune new Algorithms.
4. Expose. The final step is exposing the data. Opening data using APIs (Application Programmable Interfaces) can be used to enable an ExO’s Community—in particular stakeholders including providers, customers, consumers, and end-users—to develop valuable services. That is, the stakeholder data layers new functionalities and innovations on top of the platform by remixing the ExO’s data with the stakeholders.
Successful examples of companies making use of intelligent exposure include the Ford Motor Company, Uber, Rabobank, the Port of Rotterdam, IBM Watson, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter, and Facebook/Meta.
Ultimately, every company will need to navigate the tsunami of change and opportunity that is coming from all aspects of AI, from Machine Learning to Generative AI.
So, how do you stay on top of the disruptive dangers and extraordinary opportunities for leverage?
The answer is you need a Chief AI Officer.
I’ve encouraged every company I chair, invest in, and advise to get one.
The Chief AI Officer is not someone in your company coding or training an LLM. Instead, they are a strategist directly to the CEO or CTO of the company.
This person is in charge of monitoring the latest emerging companies, apps, and AI strategies and determining which are of the greatest value to different parts of your company.
Your Chief AI Officer is building partnerships, acquiring licenses, and training your employees. He or she is also making recommendations on how and where to flow in AI at every level of your ExO.
Why This Matters
The current and future explosion of data harvested from the world’s billions and trillions of sensors can be analyzed only through the deployment of Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms.
Given that they are so much more objective, scalable, and flexible than human beings, AI and Algorithms are the keys to the future of business in general.
Exponential Organizations will lead this new economy.
What will you create? How will YOU uplift humanity?
In our next blog in this series, we’ll continue focusing on outward-facing traits encapsulated by the acronym SCALE, and dive into Leveraged Assets.